The Only Story(61)

Gordon Macleod: whom he had once wanted to kill, even if Joan had told him there hadn’t been a local murder since the Villagers wore woad. An exemplar of the kind of Englishman he most loathed. Patronising, patriarchal, manneredly precise. Not to mention violent and controlling. He remembered how it had seemed to him that Macleod was somehow preventing him from growing up: not by doing anything, simply by existing. ‘And how many Fancy Boys are you providing yourself with this weekend?’ Bravely, Susan had responded, ‘I think it’s just Ian and Eric this weekend. Unless the others turn up as well.’ Gordon Macleod’s words had been like fire; he’d laughed at them, as Susan had done, but they had scorched his skin.

And then there was that other occasion when words were spoken which had echoed down his life. That furious, squat man in his dressing gown, his eyes invisible in the gloom, bullying down on him as he gripped the banister in panic.

‘Whatski? Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?’

At the time, he had blushed, feeling his skin burn. But beyond this, he thought the fellow must simply be mad. That’s to say, mad enough to have somehow listened in to his and Susan’s private conversations. Unless he’d hidden a tape recorder beneath his wife’s bed. And the thought of that had made him blush all over again.

It had taken him years to realize that this had not been crazy malevolence, but something quite unintended, which nevertheless held a powerful and destructive resonance. Gordon Macleod, roused from his bed by the sound of his wife’s lover, had merely, in that moment, and probably with no ulterior motive, fallen back on the private language he had shared with Susan. Shared? More than that – created. And which Susan had then brought into her relationship with him. Unthinkingly. You say ‘darling’, you say ‘my love’, you say ‘kiss me hardly’, you say ‘whatski?’, you say ‘my fine and feathered friend’, because those are the words which come to you at that moment. With no ulterior motive on her part either. And now he wondered if any of her turns of phrase, which had so beguiled him, had been her own. Perhaps only ‘We’re a played-out generation’, because it seemed unlikely that Gordon Macleod, in all his self-importance, believed that he and men of his age were played out.

He remembered a public service advertisement from the time when the government, grudgingly, had acknowledged the existence of AIDS. There were two versions of the ad, he seemed to remember: a photo of a woman in bed with about half a dozen men, and one of a man in bed with about half a dozen women, all side by side like sardines. The text pointed out that every time you went to bed with someone new, you also went to bed with everyone he or she had previously gone to bed with. The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.

And actions as well, for that matter. Except that – strangely, fortunately – actions had never caused a problem. He had never found himself thinking, Oh, when you did that with your hand or arm or leg or tongue, you must also have done it with x and y and z. Such thoughts and images had never bothered him, and he was grateful, because he could easily imagine how ghostly antecedents in your head could drive you mad. But ever since Gordon Macleod’s sneer had first made sense to him, he had become conscious – at times, absurdly so – of what must have been going on, verbally, since the day Adam or Eve or whoever it might have been first took another lover.

Once, he had mentioned this discovery to a girlfriend: lightly, almost frivolously, as if it were natural and inevitable and therefore interesting. A day or two later, in bed, she had teasingly called him ‘my fine and feathered friend’.

‘No!’ he had shouted, instantly retreating to his side of the mattress, ‘You’re not allowed to call me that!’

She had been shocked by his vehemence. And he had shocked himself. But he was protecting a phrase which had always been uniquely between Susan and himself. Except that, earlier, it had been a phrase uniquely between the newly married Mr Gordon Macleod and his hopeful, puzzled wife.

So, for a while – say, twenty years or more – he had found himself morbidly sensitive to lovers’ language. This was ridiculous, of course. He saw rationally that there was only a limited vocabulary available, and it shouldn’t matter when the same words were recycled, when nightly, across the globe, billions asserted the uniqueness of their love with secondhand phrases. Except that sometimes it did. Which meant that here, as elsewhere, pre-history ruled.

He imagined the Village tennis courts replaced by a spread of the finest modern boxes, or perhaps a more lucrative clump of low-rise flats. He wondered if anyone, anywhere, had ever looked at a housing development and thought: Why don’t we knock them all down and build a nice tennis club, one with the latest all-weather courts? Or maybe – yes, why don’t we go further and lay some proper old-fashioned grass courts, for tennis as it once used to be? But no one would ever do, or even think, that, would they? Things, once gone, can’t be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can’t be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can’t be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn’t forget, because we have been changed for ever.

Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analysed it, sought to understand its shape, its colour, its weight and its boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshakeable given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of his, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.